By Elizabeth Osayande
A new global report, HP Futures 2026, has urged policymakers in Nigeria and worldwide to prioritise durable skills such as creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration that will be essential in workplaces of the future.
The report, led by HP, the Global Learning Council, and the Education Leaders Forum, convened 58 education, policymaking and future of work leaders globally to examine how education systems can equip young people for the future of work.
The report called on policymakers to develop clear blueprints for helping students build durable skills and to ensure that these skills are not treated as secondary or extracurricular.
According to the report, durable skills are becoming the core infrastructure of future readiness and must be resourced, timetabled and assessed accordingly.
HP Futures 2026 recommends designing future skills-building programmes for public systems and low-resource contexts to ensure that durable skills do not become another source of inequality, through methods such as teacher-mediated AI, low-bandwidth delivery and predictable costs.
It also called on policymakers to keep literacy, numeracy and identity-forming learning at the core of education, while using creative, hands-on approaches to deliver fundamentals and durable skills simultaneously.
The report argues that durable skills must become a core part of education systems rather than an optional addition. It calls for greater support for educators, who remain central to helping students develop the creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration skills that employers increasingly value.
It further asks policymakers to recognise that assessment remains the biggest bottleneck to widespread building of durable skills, and that education systems need to create standardised assessment pathways for durable skills that are recognised by higher education institutions and employers across geographies.
The report also argues that Nigeria and education systems worldwide should take students’ voices into account when creating durable skills-based curricula.
Commenting on the findings,Chief Commercial Officer at HP and Chair of HP Futures, David McQuarrie, said: “Educators, policymakers and employers share a responsibility to prepare young people for the opportunities and challenges they will encounter throughout their lives and careers. As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms how we learn and work, that responsibility has never been more important. Education systems must do more to help students develop, demonstrate and continuously strengthen the capabilities that will remain valuable regardless of how technology evolves.”
Director & Global Head Education Business and Strategy at HP, Mayank Dhingra, added: “In this report, experts call for new education models that take durable skills into account, and for students to be offered interoperable, transnational means to credentialise their durable skills so that higher education institutions and employers share a common benchmark for these crucial Future of Work abilities. Furthermore, the experts called on policymakers to take action immediately to ensure AI-era readiness and durable skills ownership does not become another source of structural inequality.
“We urge policymakers and education leaders in Nigeria and around the world to review their findings, and draw on them as they work to create education systems that will set students up for success in the brave new world we are entering.”
Meanwhile, the full HP Futures 2026 report can be gotten on hp website.
HP Futures conducted an online survey from May to June 2026, which received 6,206 responses from students in 37 countries across versions published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, Italian and Arabic. Respondents ranged from under 12 to over 25 years old, with 88 per cent of those stating an age between 12 and 17.
The report also convened 58 leading experts for a series of roundtable discussions and one-to-one interviews, and compiled a series of practical case studies from schools, universities, employers, NGOs and public systems around the world.
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